He is also a gifted commentator on the art and craft of composition and was recognised in his student years as an outstanding poet (he wrote his own libretto for Gatsby). Today he continues to convey, through the spoken word, the multiple meanings of contemporary composition.

John Harbison’s recent works and first performances include Six American Painters in versions for flute and oboe quartet, and String Quartet No. 4, a co-commission for the Orion Quartet by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, and Caramoor Festival. He has written for the Boston Symphony a Requiem and Four Psalms, completed in 1999, commissioned by the Israeli Consulate of Chicago and composed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. There have also been important revivals at the Metropolitan Opera and at the Lyric Opera in Chicago of The Great Gatsby. Harbison has been composer-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Santa Fe Chamber Festivals, and the American Academy in Rome. His music has been performed by many of the world’s leading ensembles, and more than thirty of his compositions have been recorded by major record companies. As a conductor, he has led a number of leading orchestras and chamber groups. From 1990 to 1992 he was Creative Chair with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducting music from Monteverdi to the present. In 1991, at the Ojai Festival, he led the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Former music director of the Cantata Singers in Boston, Harbison has conducted many other ensembles, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Handel and Haydn Society. For many years he has been principal guest conductor of Emmanuel Music in Boston, leading performances of Bach cantatas, seventeenth-century motets, and new music.

Born in Orange, New Jersey on 20th December 1938 into a musical family, John Harbison was improvising on the piano by the age of five and started a jazz band when he was twelve. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard University and earned an MFA from Princeton University. Following completion of a junior fellowship at Harvard, Harbison joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, in 1984, he was named Class of 1949 Professor of Music and, in 1994, the Killian Award Lecturer in recognition of “extraordinary professional accomplishments”; he has also taught at CalArts and Boston University and is currently on the faculty of the Aspen Music Festival. In 1991, he was the Mary Biddle Duke Lecturer in Music at Duke University, with a publication forthcoming from Duke University Press. In 1998, Harbison had the distinction of being named winner of the important Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities. Among other awards the composer has received are the Kennedy Center Friedheim First Prize of 1980 for his Piano Concerto, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989. With his wife Rose Mary Harbison, for whom he has composed much of his violin music, he runs the Token Creek Music Festival on the family farm in Wisconsin.

He has a particular interest in furthering the work of younger composers, and serves on the boards of directors of the American Academy in Rome, the Copland Fund (as president), and the Koussevitzky Foundation, as well as juries of the Fromm Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.